AWN Headline News

Nickelodeon has extended its licensing agreement with Centrum Kids to launch a line of Centrum Kids Jimmy Neutron multivitamins. Centrum originally partnered with Nickelodeon to offer RUGRATS chewable multivitamins for kids, and will now present a new line featuring the characters Jimmy, Carl, Cindy and Goddard from the Oscar-nominated film JIMMY NEUTRON: BOY GENIUS and the Nickelodeon series THE ADVENTURES OF JIMMY NEUTRON, BOY GENIUS. Animated characters have always featured prominently in the kids vitamin arena.

The 3rd Sundance Online Film Festival

World Wide Web and Park City, Utah, USA

Sunday, December 01, 2002 - Sunday, January 26, 2003

Entry Deadline: Friday, September 27, 2002

HOWDI GAUDI, a new animation series inspired by the designs of Spanish architect Antoní Gaudí, will be launched at Mipcom Junior. The Gaudins Project, Steve Walsh Productions and Agogo Entertainment, in association with TV Catalunya, have completed the 26 episode half-hour series which was supervised by SIMPSONS' producer Phil Roman. The series had its Spanish premiere this September 11th on TV Catalunya, which aired a "Making Of' special along with 3 episodes of the series. HOWDI GAUDI will debut September 17, 2002 on Disney Channel Spain.

On Sunday, October 6, 2002 MIPCOM Junior's "Talking With" sessions will host Gary E. Knell, president and CEO of Sesame Workshop. He will be interviewed by George Winslow, director of special projects, Reed Television Group. "Talking With" is an informal interview session that offers market participants an opportunity to interact with major players in the TV industry. Knell will unveil the story of the organization that revolutionized television with the legendary SESAME STREET and tell how its mission to create educational and challenging content for children is carried out.

Winners of the 54th Annual Creative Arts Emmy Awards were announced at the Shrine Auditorium on September 14, 2002. SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE's Darrell Hammond hosted the evening, which honors television's top talent behind the camera. In the animation-related categories, FUTURAMA, which recently found a new home on Cartoon Network, picked up its first Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program Less Than One Hour, beating out fellow Fox nominees THE SIMPSONS and KING OF THE HILL, as well as Comedy Central's SOUTH PARK and Nickelodeon's AS TOLD BY GINGER.

Ex'pression, a digital arts school located in California's Bay Area, has given several of its Digital Graphics Design students the chance to apply the knowledge gained in classes to a real world situation when they were selected by Tech TV to create a station ID for the technology channel. Using applications including Maya and After Effects, the students created the 10-second long bumper, called "Marble Madness," which shows the Tech TV logo elements (silver and red balls) becoming marbles.

Digital effects plug-in provider GenArts Inc. has released version 1.0 of its Sapphire plug-in for Shake 2.5 for Mac OS X. The company is also reducing the price of Sapphire plug-ins for Shake on all platforms by 25%. "Shake users tell us that Sapphire Plug-ins are a natural extension to their systems, so it was important for us to make our plug-ins available for Mac OS X," said Karl Sims, GenArts' President and Founder.

Germany's EM.TV found success with its first installment of the whimsical series FAIRY TALE POLICE DEPARTMENT (FTPD), which has sold to broadcasters in France, Italy, Spain, Latin America, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Africa and the Ukraine. Therefore, EM.TV will be bringing another round of FTPD to this year's show. The second series of FTPD (13 x 24-minutes) follows a special unit of the secret service that fights crime in the fairy tale world. FTPD agents Johnny Legend and his partner Chris Anderson ensure that all fairy tale favorites really do live happily ever after.

Realviz has announced that MatchMover 2.5 Professional is now available. The software is a professional solution used to track 3D camera data and motion from videos and film sequences. With this new version, users can move smoothly back and forth between automatic and manual tracking with no interruption of workflow.

France Animation has signed a number of deals across its children's programming catalogue. Following the success of the first 26 episodes of animated series WHEEL SQUAD, Disney Channel Asia has made a commitment to the second season with a deal for a further 13 episodes. Radio Canada has also picked up all 39 episodes for broadcast beginning in September 2002. The series, which has also been sold to Disney Middle East and Fox Kids Latin America, is a co-production with Rai, M6, Praxinos and Colorland Animation.

Curious Labs has begun shipping Poser 5, the new version of their award-winning 3D-character animation tool for artists and animators. Dynamic cloth and strand-based hair, photo-based facial mapping, and the new FireFly render engine are some of the new features included in Poser 5.

How will Jar Jar look when he is 8 stories tall? This question will be answered on November 1, 2002, when a large-format version of STAR WARS: EPISODE II "ATTACK OF THE CLONES" debuts in IMAX theatres in the United States and Canada. The film will be digitally re-mastered using the proprietary IMAX DMR (Digital Re-mastering) technology, which allows live-action motion pictures to be inexpensively converted into the 15/70 format for presentation on the giant IMAX screen, while maintaining and even enhancing the conventional image resolution.